Unlike a professional batter, a layman isn’t going to do much analysis. He’s not going to be closely studying the pitcher’s body movements and think, “Ah, that movement indicates a slider” or be strategically thinking, “With 2 strikes and no balls, the pitcher has incentive to throw a ball slightly out of the strike zone to bait me into swinging,” etc. The layman would likely just swing pretty randomly - still giving his best effort, of course, but with no learned skill.
So, against an MLB pro pitcher, how much luck would a layman have if he just swings in an aw-shucks way at the white-blur baseball approaching him? Could he make bat contact with the ball every 10 swings? Get to first base once every 50 at-bats?
Roger Kahn in ‘The Boys of Summer’ mentions being asked by a Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher to stand in at the plate for a more realistic workout, and being overwhelmed by the speed of the pitches, even though the pitcher in question wasn’t known for being a fireballer.
For someone not used to it, it’d take courage to remain upright without diving out of the way.
You’d need to be in both the right position, and the right time. For the position, a typical strike zone is about 22 inches tall, and assume that a major league pitcher could be pitching to any height in that range. The sum of the diameters of a bat and ball are around 5.5 inches, so right there, it’s only a 1 in 4 chance that your bat will be in the right place.
The timing, I’m not as sure how to calculate. Does it need to be a proper swing, or can we bunt?
Oh, and I’m also assuming that the goal is just any contact at all, not what baseball statistics call a “hit”. A lot are going to be foul tips, and even if you get it to go forward, they’ll probably be easily caught.
Many years ago, when I was in my mid 40s and my son was about 12 and aspiring to be a baseball player, I took him to a hitting cage for some off-season batting practice. On a dare, I stepped into the box for 10 pitches from the machine. As I recall, the top speed I faced was 70 mph, much slower than an MLB pitcher. All 10 pitches were ‘straight’; no curves or sinkers.
I did a similar thing in my early 30s. We played a lot of sandlot ball as kids, but it was all slow pitch or lob. I decided to try the 70mph cage like you. How hard can it be? You did better than I did. I didn’t even make contact.
I do not know the odds for a layman but I have seen more than one article that suggests hitting a baseball thrown by a MLB pitcher is the hardest thing to do in sports:
Ted Williams, regarded as one of the greatest — if not the greatest — hitters of all time, finished his career hitting a .344 average, tying for seventh of all time. Even Williams himself admitted hitting a baseball was the hardest thing to do in sports.
With the average velocity of a Major League pitch coming in at over 90 miles per hour, and with the pitcher’s mound only 60.5 feet away, batters have 150 milliseconds first to decide if the pitch is a strike and then swing.
On top of extremely good hand-eye coordination required by the sport, baseball players also must have the ability to decide whether to swing and be able to decipher what pitch is being thrown. Things get tricky when they have to decide in a matter of milliseconds where the ball will be and whether or not to swing at it. - SOURCE
I think Ted William’s odds set an upper limit (near enough). A layman will be a lot worse. I’d guess almost never except for luck.
When I was in my late 20s and early 30s, I was a reasonably good contact hitter in slow-pitch softball, though I was never able to hit for power; in that era, I used to go to the batting cages for batting practice a lot. The one and only time I tried a machine that threw 60 or 70 mph, this was exactly my experience; I just wasn’t able to even start my swing quickly enough to make contact, and a 70mph pitch with a softball is both (a) a bigger target, and (b) moving 20 to 25 mph slower than an MLB pitcher’s fastball.
With more practice, I might have gotten a bit better at the timing, but I suspect the best that I could do would be occasionally making a bit of contact, when I somehow might manage to have the bat in the right spot at the right time.
The OP needs to remember that MLB batters are likely in the top 1/100th of 1% of talent at their job, have been hitting baseballs every day (or close to it) for a decade or two, and still only get a hit roughly 25% of the time.
If the pitcher was throwing fastballs (little to no movement) you might eventually get the timing right and by pure chance you’d make contact eventually.
Once the pitcher throws breaking balls and off-speed pitches the average human would be lost.
Add me into the bunch who’s never even been able to get a foul tip in a 70-mph batting cage. I’ve been able to hit some slow-pitch whoppers, but fast pitch has eluded me in my teens, 20s and 30s. By the time I hit my 40s I learned to stop making an ass of myself.
My last time at the cages was two years ago when i went with my teenage daughter and father-in-law. I impressed the shit out of my daughter with the massive hits I blasted in the slow-pitch cage. It’s rare to see a look of amazement in your kid’s eyes once they hit their teen years, but after I knocked the hide off those softballs, she was impressed. I don’t think she knew I ever played softball. Even asked me “How’d you do that?!” Then she and her grandpa tried coaxing me into the fast pitch cage, but I knew better. I said I had a blister and couldn’t swing anymore. No way was I letting her walk away with a memory of her old man pathetically flailing away at a fast ball.
Pro athletes reaction time and strength is unbelievably superior to the average layman. I remember when Anna Kournikova was a guest on The Apprentice in 2004 after she had retired due to injury. She had a bunch of the male contestants out on the tennis court and bet none of them could come close to returning one of her serves. She was right, not a single one came close.
Unitl a few years ago, MLB pitchers were required to bat alongside the position players. Even though all were superb athletes, they were - with a few exceptions - terrible at hitting. Most struck out without making any contact, or hit a weak ground ball.
The average Joe would have little chance at making solid contact.
If they’re not actively trying to get you out, just throwing straight single speed pitches over the plate (like a human pitching machine), you might tip it once in a while. I suspect that a human pitcher is easier to time than a pitching machine, but we would have to start our swings very early to have a chance.
If they’re trying to get you out, they’ll throw a slider or curve and you’ll be diving on the ground instead of swinging, or just throw something too high or low to hit and you’ll swing anyway because you have to start so early.
True, but even if he did, it wouldn’t much matter because the hand/eye coordination it takes to hit a round ball with a round bat squarely when the guy throwing the ball is making it sail, sink, curve or slide and, as a bonus, varying speed, would make the average lay person look ridiculous.
I topped out in my baseball ability roughly when the fastballs got up to 80. I could make contact with an 80mph pitch, but not consistently or solidly. Remember, Ted Williams’s batting average of .344 isn’t how often he HIT the ball. Ted Williams made contact a lot more than that, he only struck out 709 times in over nine thousand times up. It’s how often he hit the wall well enough to be fair and evade the defense - and in the majors, the fielders are ludicrously great. Just making some contact isn’t the same as really hitting. If you just held the bat out straight and tried to tap the ball you could make contact. Actually swinging hard enough to propel the baseball a reasonable distance is a very different matter.
In MLB, of couorse, 80mph is a curveball or a very good changeup. Other breaking balls like sliders and forkballs are way faster than that. The experience of facing pitches at and above 90 is genuinely intimidating. The difference between 80 and 90 is a lot greater than the numbers suggest. It’s like trying to hit a bullet.
I played a lot of baseball and in my prime would have been humiliated had I tried to hit MLB pitching. You might make contac tout of luck every now and then if you know how to hit and get more than one at bat.
When you look deeper many of those pitchers were the best athlete to come out of their high school. They often played multiple positions in high school and batted some rediculous average. There are a few outliers but for the most part they are superb athletes. It’s just that when they started to specialize in pitching they stopped practicing hitting which made it impossible to hit another major league pitcher.
In 1997 I went to the Louisville Slugger museum. They had a pitching machine set up throwing at a clear plastic target so you could stand where the catcher is. They had the machine set at 90+ MPH. I could barely see the ball let alone hit it. At 90 the ball hits the catchers mitt in .45 seconds. The average person wouldn’t be able to get the bat off their shoulder. Eventually after many tries someone could guess the timing and hope to swing where the ball is going. Maybe after seeing the same pitch over and over you might be able to foul one off.
Nowadays a pitcher that tops off at 90MPH is working as a car salesman. Even if you are throwing harder and don’t have movement you aren’t going to last.
Yep. While getting a hit on a pro baseball pitch is extremely difficult, returning a pro tennis serve is similarly difficult.
For comparison, men’s tennis serves are typically 120 mph (topping out around 140 mph), although it’s 78 ft from baseline to baseline. I’m not sure where the 150 ms is coming from. For baseball 60.5 ft / 132 fps = 450 ms, while for tennis 78 ft / 176 fps = 440 ms, so similar times in flight.
Tennis balls are 10% smaller, about 67 mm vs 74 mm diameter. The sweet spot of a baseball bat is about 150 mm long and maybe 10 mm width, for an effective area of about 1500 mm^2. Tennis rackets have a sweet spot of about 50 mm diameter for an effective area of about 2000 mm^2.
Valid return area is hugely different. The baseball infield is a 90 ft square with an area of 8100 ft^2. A half tennis court is 39 ft by 27 ft with an area of 1053 ft^2. Of course, the baseball batter can also hit to the outfield, but the tennis net effectively blocks a significant fraction of the tennis court.
I don’t have the book in front of me, but IIRC in The Sports Gene the author talked about this. Supposedly MLB hitters were found to have more or less the same reaction times as anyone else. What they did have that was different was:
Very good eyesight
The ability to detect the ball coming off the pitcher’s hand
A great deal of information is gleaned from that. If you obscure their view of the ball at the moment of release, their chances of hitting it plummet.
Hitting an ordinary fastball, or even a basic curve would be difficult but maybe 1 in 10 pitches you might make contact. A hit that would get you on base would be much rarer with pros in the field. Maybe not 1 in 50. The infield will be in so even a bunt that could get a pro on base isn’t going to work. Your best bet is a fielding error. Someone a little better than the average layman who could run has a small chance to get on base with any decent contact, but if that happens he’ll never get another pitch he has a chance of hitting.